What you just gave is an imaginary description from someone who evidently doesn't use YouTube. I remember seeing Google presentations (on its official YouTube channel) in 2007 and 2008 where executives were saying that the goal of Google Search is to get you to what you're looking for as quickly as possible, and that's one reason that Google Search became the leader in search, and its very name is a verb for looking up something online. YouTube does the same exact thing, and the way they hook you into watching more are the automatic "related video" and "subscribe" overlays in the video player itself, and then the long column of related videos and, for any professional video, a pre-made playlist that is based on the viewing selections of other viewers, in the left column (on desktop browsers) or under the video (on phones). If I'm looking up a video by a singer, I find a long list of results. If I'm looking up funny bulldog videos, I find the same. If I'm looking up burger-cooking tutorials, I find the same. If I'm looking up clips from a certain TV show, I find the same. You're saying that YouTube doesn't do that? Try looking up some things on it and see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/
I follow a number of channels on YouTube that I enjoy: finding similar channels is no easier than it was before I discovered them. YouTube doesn't intelligently recommend me similar things, nor is there any facility to look for similar channels unless the creators of those channels have gone and curated such lists manually. The "because you watched" recommendations on YouTube's home feed are always of the same variety, with weak relationship to what I follow, rather than genuine similarity.
Some examples:
- I watch an educational video about repairing an old engine; YouTube gives me tonnes of promotional videos about car brands instead of educational content by other makers/fixers.
- I watch an academic critique of the Bechdel test; YouTube gives me Hollywood trailers and popular movie clips
- I watch a documentary clip about traditional food in Italy; YouTube gives me BuzzFeed millennials tasting things
The latter recommendations are not because that's the only content, the former content exists, it's just not pushed by YouTube because it doesn't lead to addictive content consumption cycles.
Reddit and Original (as in when it was college email addresses only) Facebook are / were really good at this.
You may go to either one with some idea of what you want to check out but hours later realize you went down a rabbit hole that never ended.
I'm not too sure Youtube is anywhere near as good as Reddit is or Facebook used to be but some people are right in saying that some of the changes Youtube has made makes it easier for a user to snap back to reality and realize it's time to get off of Youtube because it's not serving you anything you want to watch -- because like you said it's hard to find by design.
We have moved towards a world of centralised services because decentralised ones are—by definition—difficult to monetise for the platform/software-maintainer(s). What people want is irrelevant when all potential options have to be initially well-funded: the choice is too restrictively limited to perform an honest comparison.
> To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet
That's because they dominate, because they're profitable for the central host.
> If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it with another YouTube. Build another centralized service that fixes the problems that YouTube has
The problems with YoutTube are caused by it being centralised, so this proposal is paradoxical.
> they all go from Active to Dead or Stalled
It's a difficult challenge. It's David v Goliath. Many fail.
> YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized network has to offer. It's just entertainment for them. They just want to watch videos and shitpost in the comments.
YouTube's audience want to be able to find entertaining/useful/educational/whatever content according to what they've come to Youtube looking for, and promptly leave after having been entertained/educated/generally fulfilled. Youtube is not incentivised to give them this; in fact it's strongly incentivised to make what they're looking for as difficult to find as possible so that they'll spend hours and hours binging vacuous addictive content looking for something but never quite finding it and getting no satisfaction from the experience.
This is not something that's unique to YouTube, it's a property of any model whereby the profits of the host/platform maintainer are tightly linked to users spending as much time navigating the platform as possible (see also Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest infinite scroll psychology).